Sourdough Chocolate Marble Loaf - MUST. LAMINATE. CAN'T. STOP.

Sourdough Chocolate Marble Loaf - MUST. LAMINATE. CAN'T. STOP.

In reply to my soft chocolate sandwich loaf post, lumos tossed me a bone, and I took the bait immediatly. Hey, it involves chocolate and lamination, two of my many bread related obsessions. Essesntially it's a technique popoular in Japan a while ago: a sheet of chocolate laminated into an enriched soft dough, displaying random but cool looking marble effect, and a subtle chocolate taste. You can use ANY lightly enriched dough for this, I used the classic Sourdough Hokkaido Milk Loaf, but any of the following would work as well (click for detailed formulas):

- It's still a soft shreddy bread, so you still have to do the intensive kneading required, no shortcuts here.

- Use the same dough/flour amount as a normal sandwich loaf. For my Chinese pullman loaf pan, I used 250g of total flour just like the Sourdough Hokkaido Milk Loaf post specifies, for a 8X4inch loaf tin, you can either increase the flour amount to 280g or leave it at 250g, depending on how tall you want the loaf to be.

- I got the chocolate sheet recipe online, but later lumos sent me a very similar one, thanks!

1. Take the dough out of fridge, press flat, let rest at room temp for one hour.2. Roll out to 25X25CM square, put the frozen chocolate sheet in the middle

3. Seal the chocolate sheet in, roll out again to 18X36CM, do a single book fold (i.e. fold in thirds, envelope fold, three-fold)

4. Roll out to 18X36CM and do the single book fold again (may need to rest dough for 10-20min before rolling out )5. Roll out to 18X36CM and do the single book fold for the third time (may need to rest dough for 10-20min before rolling out )6. Rest dough for 20min, roll out to be slightly longer and wider than the loaf tin, cut in 3 stripes with one end connected

7. Braid and put in oiled loaf tin

8. Proof and bake as the original dough formula requires, in this case it took 6.5 hours to proof, and 40min at 375min to bake.

Marble effect inside out

Do note that this is not a dessert-like sweet bread, it's a typical Asian soft loaf - slightly sweet, shreddably soft, with subtle chocolate flavors.

Oh yeah, it's A LOT easier than making croissants, the chocolate sheet is not easy to melt.

hehehe I thought you'd be on new ideas already. They all sounds good! When you use sesami, make sure it's black one...though I'm sure I don't have to remind you.;) Another option is mix some cocoa powder or instant coffee granules into dough to make it dark and laminate with white chocolate...... I can almost hear you brain's ticking already with even more new wild ideas....:p

Just to give you some idea for more options, these are the ready made sheets you can buy in Japan for this purpose. The page is already translated into English using Google Translater, so naturally, some translation are weird.... ( for example 'pan' is actually 'bread' in Japanese. They call this product 'pan sheet = bread sheet' over there) If you click the pictures, it'll take you to the page with more detailed description of each sheet with the actual colour in the packet.

being printed out as we type, and will just have to try it out! LOL May be awhile until I actually get a bread that bakes, to try it with, but its in the list.

I am finally caught up on the 4 months worth of posts I was behind on, and that took a solid month of working one or two a day to get through. These last days posts are finally done, I had five days worth this mroning, and now after hours of work, am down to one day, today! Yay!

But have been following the chocolate bread oddisy and am intrigued enough to print the recipes off, now to sort out and put into books the whole lot I've printed in the last while! ARG! that will probably wait until cold weather as we have to do some stuff outside yet.

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